The Golden Key, George Macdonald (365 Books, Day 252)

[rushthatspeaks]

Then the Old Man of the Earth stooped over the floor of the cave, raised a huge stone from it, and left it leaning. It disclosed a great hole that went plumb-down.

“That is the way,” he said.

“But there are no stairs.”

“You must throw yourself in. There is no other way.”

She turned and looked him full in the face— stood so for a whole minute, as she thought: it was a whole year— then threw herself headlong into the hole.

There is something Stephen King said once, in I think Danse Macabre, which has stuck with me, which is that you can tell whether something is good at what it is doing by the resonance it makes in you. He was talking about horror movies, and saying that sometimes it is worth sitting through an entire film full of dreadful schlock, for the sake of the instant when everything comes together and chimes like crystal struck. You can hear that ring in the oddest of places, and sometimes it is for only one instant, and sometimes you can't put your finger on it but can only say that, there, that thing, yes. That is the ring of the authentic and the true.

And sometimes there is something that is from start to finish one resonance of that clear tone.

George Macdonald is a wildly erratic writer for me; as I have mentioned I love both Lilith and Phantastes, and also The Princess and the Goblin, but I read The Light Princess day before yesterday and-- well. There are sentences of it that resound, mostly involving the moon on the water, but. And The Princess and Curdie is terrible.

So my thanks to those of you who recommended The Golden Key, as it is an antidote to that side of Macdonald. I have no idea whether anyone else likes this sort of thing, although I expect so, because it is full of things that are beautiful and unusual: a land in which shadows are piled in drifts, higher than snow; feathered fish that swim through the air.

But it is a kind of story that resonates so strongly with me that I cannot say much about it. It is the kind of story that acts on me like the clapper of a bell: in short, why I read fantasy. I have spent a lot of my reading life listening for that resonance in the tiny instances, so so much of it at once can be a little overwhelming, although entirely delightful. If there is a kind of book you love, I hope that every so often you have the joy of running into something that is nothing but that. It doesn't happen frequently, and wouldn't be as valuable if it did.